The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for managing system locale names so as to keep globalization support coherence.
Locale names are used by multicultural operating systems and applications to perform a number of operations that provide cultural conventions, geographical customization, and/or special variant preferences for a particular locale, where the “locale” is a certain set of rules and parameters of cultural conventions with certain script and geographical location with which a user affiliates oneself. The locale defines the user's language, script, region, and any special variant preferences that the user wants to user in their computing environment. That is, the locale may not necessarily be the actual physical location of the user, but is a culture convention correlated geographical location with which the user associates oneself, e.g., a user of Chinese descent working in the United States may still utilize the locale of China even though the user is physically located in the United States. The locale may be specified at various levels of language, script, geographical detail including region, territory, or the like.
Based on different locales, multicultural operating systems may process data in different ways. For example, locales are used to determine how to process communication data, e.g., determining in which language to output a communication. Other examples include determining a keyboard input mapping, determining currency conventions and input/output, determining date/time format, numeric representations, and the like.